Ethiopia / Africa

  

Clampdown in Addis: Introduction

IN OCTOBER 1995, TESFAYE TEGEN, the editor of a weekly newspaper in Addis Ababa, made a very costly editorial decision. U.S.-backed insurgents who had toppled Soviet-backed dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam four years before had just held elections to legitimize their rule. Tesfaye’s* paper, Beza, ran cartoons lampooning members of the new government as a submissive…

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Clampdown in Addis: Ethiopia’s Journalists at Risk

Table of Contents Introductory Essay by Josh Friedman Clampdown in Addis: Ethiopia’s Journalists at Risk

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Clampdown in Addis: The Press Proclamation and the Prosecution of Journalists

Ethiopia’s independent journalists currently work under threat of prosecution from three separate areas of government: a poorly trained police force that sometimes operates independently of the public prosecutor’s office; an inexperienced, partisan judiciary operating in a severely backlogged court system; and overly sensitive government officials who are offended by public criticism of their actions. Journalists…

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Clampdown in Addis: State Media: The Government Press and the Broadcast Monopoly

The Ethiopian government currently publishes four major newspapers and owns and controls all broadcast media. The primary challenge facing the state-run news outlets is a public perception of irrelevance and lack of objectivity. As one journalist who has worked for both the private press and the state media told CPJ, “The government press is not…

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Press Faces Hard Times in Africa: Repression Persists in Many Countries

Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Jan. 13–When this country opened the way for an independent press at the turn of the decade, the blossoming of newspapers of nearly every political persuasion was widely hailed as a critical stepping stone toward true multiparty democracy. But here, as elsewhere in Africa, rather than marking a clean break with an…

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More journalists jailed than ever

CPJ’s 1995 report surveys 101 countries The bullet-ridden wall pictured on the cover is a detail from a photograph taken in Somalia by American photojournalist Dan Eldon of Reuters. Eldon, Associated Press photojournalist Hansi Krauss, and Reuter colleagues Hosea Maina and Anthony Macharia were murdered in July 1993 by a Somali crowd angered by the…

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Around the world: A regional look at the state of press freedom in 1995

Africa For the third consecutive year, Ethiopia held more journalists in jail–31 at year’s end–than any other country in Africa. Most were detained without charges.

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